For Anne Holton, Tim Kaine’s Wife, Elite Circles Are Old Turf
Anne Holton, who is married to the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Senator Tim Kaine, at a rally on Monday in Richmond, Va. Chet Strange for The New York Times
This weekend, Tim Kaine and his wife, Anne Holton, are expected to step off the campaign trail for a beach vacation with their extended family at the Virginia shore.
It is an annual tradition, as is Ms. Holton’s practice of making the adults hand over all their grocery store receipts. She ensures that every household, factoring in the number of children, has paid not a dollar more or less than its fair share.
“She is not the accountant, she’s the judge,” said her brother Dwight Holton, a former United States attorney in Oregon. “No one has ever questioned her Solomonic wisdom.”
The daughter of a governor who grew up to marry a man who became governor, senator and now vice-presidential nominee, Ms. Holton has lived since childhood in a world of politics and power. But relatives and friends describe her as being uncommonly unimpressed by the trappings of privilege and instead driven by an almost religious sense of fairness, an aversion to idleness and a family-bred commitment to service that has helped elevate her into one-half of Virginia’s most famous power couple.
As a child, Ms. Holton, 58, had a symbolic role in helping integrate Virginia’s public schools before graduating from Princeton and meeting Mr. Kaine at Harvard Law School. As he rose up Virginia’s political ladder, she achieved renown in her own right as a legal aid lawyer, family court judge and Virginia’s secretary of education, a job she resigned once her husband was chosen as Hillary Clinton’s running mate.
In some ways, Ms. Holton, who has been mentioned as a possible replacement for her husband in the Senate, represents Mrs. Clinton’s road not taken, continuing to pursue her career throughout her husband’s ascent rather than waiting her turn.
But now those roads have converged on the presidential campaign trail, For Anne Holton, Tim Kaine’s Wife, Elite Circles Are Old Turf - The New York Times: